Quotes

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

No crime has been without a precedent.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.